CARTOGRAPHERS NAMING RIGHTS & WRONGS: ETYMOLOGY OF AMERICA (from Wiki) — The earliest known use of the name America dates to April 25, 1507, where it was applied to what is now known as South America.[40] It appears on a small globe map with twelve time zones, together with the largest wall map made to date, both created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in France.[41] These were the first maps to show the Americas as a land mass separate from Asia. An accompanying book, Cosmographiae Introductio, anonymous but apparently written by Waldseemüllers collaborator Matthias Ringmann,[42] states, I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part [that is, the South American mainland], after Americus who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, Amerigen, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women. Americus Vespucius is the Latinized version of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespuccis name, and America is the feminine form of Americus. Amerigo itself is an Italian form of the medieval Latin Emericus (see also Saint Emeric of Hungary), which like the German form Heinrich (in English, Henry) derives from the Old High German name Haimirich.[43] Vespucci was apparently unaware of the use of his name to refer to the new landmass, as Waldseemüllers maps did not reach Spain until a few years after his death.[42] Ringmann may have been misled into crediting Vespucci by the widely published Soderini Letter, a sensationalized version of one of Vespuccis actual letters reporting on the mapping of the South American coast, which glamorized his discoveries and implied that he had recognized that South America was a continent separate from Asia; in fact, it is not known what Vespucci believed on this count, and he may have died believing what Columbus had, that they had reached the East Indies in Asia rather than a new continent.[44] Spain officially refused to accept the name America for two centuries, saying that Columbus should get credit, and Waldseemüllers later maps, after Ringmanns death, did not include it; however, usage was established when Gerardus Mercator applied the name to the entire New World in his 1538 world map. Acceptance may have been aided by the natural poetic counterpart that the name America made with Asia, Africa, and Europa.[42] In modern English, North and South America are generally considered separate continents, and taken together are called the Americas in the plural, parallel to similar situations such as the Carolinas. When conceived as a unitary continent, the form is generally the continent of America in the singular. However, without a clarifying context, singular America commonly refers in English to the United States of America.[7] World map of Waldseemüller (Germany, 1507), which first used the name America (in the lower-left section, over South America)[40]
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 23:20:02 +0000
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